


Good help is hard to find.

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Settle in and find your home [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Maria Hill has no time for your bullshit, Maria Hill's terrible horrible no good very bad weeks, Pepper Potts and her team of badass ladies, Pepper Potts has no time for your bullshit, everyone wants to hire Maria Hill, hypercompetent women, ladies in the Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 04:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11524182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: "No offense meant, but I'm not up for games, Pepper - what do you want?"Pepper startles Maria by being just as blunt - not that Pepper plays around much, but she's usually one for observing basic social niceties and putting the kind of lead-up to a conversation that means you more or less know where things are going. Apparently not right now. She just takes her cue from Maria instead."I want you to sign this," she says, as Eva takes a folder out of her bag and leans over to place the SI-stationery file she takes out of that in front of Maria on the table, "I want you to take the job I'm offering you, and I want you to sort out the absolute fucking rats'-nest of a mess in the security and personnel end of my company. I want to make goddamn sure that nobody ever manages to do what they did on Insight Day again."





	Good help is hard to find.

**Author's Note:**

> The full events of what happened in Stark Tower on Insight Day will totally see the light of day at some point I swear. *facehands*

Maria watches Natasha's Ten Whole Minutes™ of willing and open cooperation with the Congressional Hearings on the cheap flat-screen from the hotel where she herself is Not Currently Under Arrest, We Promise. 

She watches it with a lot of trepidation, and some significant concern, both for the actual lives of the people in the room and for the fallout if Natasha snaps and starts killing people even if, at this point, Maria's not at all convinced they don't all fucking deserve it. It'll just make everything that much harder and in six months when (hopefully) Natasha's a bit more stable, it'll also make her feel really bad. So it'd be better if it just . . . didn't happen. 

It's obvious to the point of pain to Maria that Natasha is _not_ okay. That Natasha can't see okay from where she's standing due to the curvature of the earth. That she might not even be able to remember, just at the moment, what okay looks like. And finally that she hasn't been okay since Nick saying _I didn't know who to trust_ \- six words that made Maria want to kick him so hard her foot broke, the second he said them. 

She didn't. Of fucking course she didn't. Of everyone there, she's the one who knows and who _knew_ , better than she had _any desire to know_ , just how fucking close Nick actually came to dying, and how much of how many different medications the doctor was giving Nick to keep him more or less on his feet, all of them very much against the doctor's better judgement. She's also the one who - she thinks - comes closest to understanding how much Pierce's betrayal fucked him up. Nick isn't a man who actually makes friends easily, and that's just his nature. Never _mind_ the shit he went through to get to where he was, to leading SHIELD, over god knows how many people who actively wanted him to fail and did everything in their power, sometimes to the risk and detriment of the whole damn world, to try to make it happen. 

The impact of having one of the few people who didn't, who seemed to be on his side, all the time, who _helped_ him, who he trusted (as much as Nick Fury trusts anyone) . . . Jesus. 

And Maria gets it. 

It's just that all the justification and circumstances and, sure, outright actual excuses, in the sense of "this genuinely excuses what he just did" do not, in fact, _stop_ that statement, those six words, from being the worst thing he could possibly ever have said anywhere that Natasha could hear. 

There's no audio equivalent to a little more than ten years' careful, hesitant but eventually freely-given trust and affection being smashed into oblivion by the metaphorical equivalent of a giant sledgehammer wielded by a malicious giant, or for all the little metaphorical shards falling all over so they can cut up everyone who walks through the space. But if there had been, Maria would have heard it in her head. She'd watched Natasha's line of sight change and she'd wanted to scream.

If anything, it shows just how fucked up Nick was that it seemed to take him a couple hours to realize what he'd done. His head was that far out of everything except the job right in front of him. It was just too late. Bluntly, it was too late the second he'd done it. And there's no way to salvage what it broke. 

Natasha could forgive him. Probably _does_ forgive him. And it still won't matter. The difference between broken bone and the worst kind of soft-tissue injury: the first one heals stronger. The second'll never, ever be the same again. And that, that was the second. Fuck, it might even have counted as an amputation.

So out of sheer _oh fuck, no, this is bad, Jesus fuck Nick no_ , Maria'd wanted to kick him. Hard. 

It was only one of the times she'd wanted to kick, punch or blow up something in those few days, and it just fucking figured that when she got to actually do it, she couldn't enjoy it since she'd been pretty sure she was executing Steve Rogers while she was at it. That had seemed really unfair. Fuck. 

But the point is, Natasha's _not okay_. And that's obvious, at least if you're Maria, and she is in fact Maria, even if sometimes over the last few days she's wondered if she's been shoved into some alternate universe filled with fucking idiots. So she's _concerned_ about those ten minutes she watches. 

She can actually see the moment something goes _snap_ in Natasha's brain. That's _really worrying_. She'd never seen that before. The only other time she's even had anything like that described, Natasha shot a SHIELD officer in the face without comment. It'd been determined a valid execution after the fact, but Natasha sure hadn't been waiting to find out. 

At that point, Clint'd been hiding in a dried out well in the middle of rural Somalia with a soon-to-be if not already infected GSW in his leg and it had been that SHIELD officer's fault; this probably counts as just about as much stress. 

It also means that when Natasha gives the whole Committee a verbal middle finger plus a metaphorical invitation to come outside and settle the whole thing, and then walks away - _and_ when nobody's stupid enough to fucking take her up on it, thank God - Maria blows out her cheeks with the sigh of relief. The fucking morons will probably never even know how close they were coming to death, either. Maybe someday Maria will get to tell them. With _diagrams_.

Since then there haven't been any mass murders, or even targeted assassinations of particular world leaders and corporate magnates, so Maria's more or less gone with assuming that Barton survived and Natasha's found him. It gets more likely every day that passes without, say, Vladimir Putin's head decorating a pike somewhere in Moscow, and Maria is fine with that. 

She does not want to even _start_ thinking about what'll happen if she's wrong, and Barton's dead. 

It's only one of many, many things she doesn't want to start thinking about. 

 

The next morning, one of the Homeland Security dipshits babysitting Maria comes in and actually asks her where Natasha is. He actually _asks her_. 

The thing is, Maria actually can't help pinching the bridge of her nose. She's actually reached the end of her ability to stop that kind of thing. She cannot act professional anymore, even if she fucking wants to. She just can't. She has run out of cope. All done. She cannot actually fucking _deal_ with this shit, she cannot even quite fucking _believe this shit_ and she just - she can't. She _can't_. 

Jesus fucking Christ. 

She gives up, too. Fuck it. At this point it's not even that she can't act professional - though she absolutely cannot fucking do it anymore - it's that she doesn't even care. They don't _deserve_ it. So fuck it. 

"It is _fucking amazing_ to me," she says, in just as cheerfully _acid_ a tone of voice as she's wanted to turn on these imbeciles since she met them, "that you don't see the fucking dichotomy here. It doesn't even give you any cognitive dissonance. It's _unbelievable_." 

When Agent Brillard just gives her a puzzled look, Maria goes on in the same acid, almost sing-song, mockingly-patient voice. Because she can. Because fuck this. Fuck everything. 

"You think somehow Ms Romanoff and I have managed to set up some magical means of communication and exchange of information," she says, "that bypasses you so completely that you have no idea how it could possibly happen. Yet at the same time, you seem to be maintaining the _delusion_ you're even _close_ to sufficiently competent to find her if she doesn't want you to." 

Agent Brillard goes pink. His partner, Gannett, goes stony-faced. Maria pins both of them with a long look each. She says, "Seriously. For the love of God, Buddha, Shiva and the _little baby Jesus_ could you _pick one_?" She keeps the pitch of her voice firmly down, but lets the volume go up. "These two beliefs are in fact _fucking incompatible_ , you incompetent morons, and given I'm stuck with you it _concerns me_ that you don't seem to be fucking aware of that." 

Agent Brillard moves from pink to flat out red. Agent Gannett, who at least has a working sense of irony and a decent poker face, just stolidly asks if that means Maria is saying she has no idea of former Agent Romanoff's whereabouts. 

Maria stares at him long enough to make him show signs of discomfort before the answers. 

"I have been sitting in this fucking room," she says, levelly, "since you fucking clowns picked me up. I have been playing sudoku, doing crosswords, and watching you pretend you're anything like sufficiently competent to actually give me any protection that I can't give myself, so that you can maintain the fiction that this isn't actually an illegal detention - which by the way? You're fucking fooling _no one_ , least of all myself and believe me I will be taking steps to address it at my earliest leisure."

She enjoys the uncomfortable shifting both men do, and goes on. "I have been in here, with eight cameras and microphones that I will be polite enough to call 'hidden' on me at all times. Including the one in the bathroom, for which, believe me, I intend to sue the _fuck_ out of you, just as soon as I can take you seriously enough to convince myself it's worth the _effort_."

Now they're both giving her the oh-fuck blank look. They're at least good at that. She enjoys that too. 

"No," she concludes, flatly. "I don't know where she is. She hasn't even tried to tell me. She's probably," Maria adds, and this part is more honest than they'll ever understand, "not talking to me right now anyway. And she sure as fuck wouldn't tell me where she's going or what she's planning to do right now - and _more importantly_ , given the _surveillance_ I'm under and the situation I'm _in_ , if she _did_ tell me anything, _I would assume she's lying as a matter of course._

"And no, before you ask," Maria goes yet further on, because it look like Brilliard's going to say something and she feels like she's developed prescience, "I have no idea what safehouses she has beyond what's been documented in the records which everyone now fucking has and you should be fucking analysing for yourselves. If anyone knew, it was Fury and Coulson, who are now both dead, and possibly Agent Barton, who has been MIA since before HYDRA's attempt to arrest Captain America, _probably_ because, while he was on assignment in Afghanistan and Agent Romanoff couldn't call on his help, she nevertheless almost certainly triggered communication protocols to tell him to get the fuck out of Dodge and hide in the hills until she could confirm what the fuck was going on, almost certainly right after she heard that Director Fury'd been attacked."

She takes a breath. "If she didn't manage to tip him off, I guarantee his body's somewhere near Kabul, because nobody in SHIELD would fucking _contemplate_ attacking either Agent Barton or Agent Romanoff without ascertaining that the other had been neutralized, which means neither would anyone in HYDRA, which means I guarantee they had something in place to _try_ to kill him the fuck off the moment they put Romanoff on the kill list." 

Not that she has to tell them this, and not that they'll be able to make any use of it, but she's still enjoying the increasingly unhappy expressions she's getting. 

She finishes, sweetly, "If that is the case, you are on the verge of the worst nightmare of your life, because on that score Agent Romanoff is likely to hold a grudge, and whether you like it or not, the government of the United States is as culpable as SHIELD for this entire shit-show and there is not a single goddamn one of you who is remotely capable of doing fuck-all about her if she decides to kill you all. 

"If, on the other hand, she _did_ manage to warn him, I can absolutely _assure you_ that you'll die before you fucking find him, because once he figures out you're looking he'll _shoot you_. And you _won't_ see it coming, because that's the man we sent to _kill the Black Widow_ , and the reason he decided to recruit her instead _wasn't_ that he couldn't get a shot." 

Brilliard and his partner now look perturbed. Maria enjoys this. A lot. 

"I'd say 'good luck'," she concludes, "but frankly you could cram shamrocks up your ass until they spill out of your mouths for the next two years and you still won't find Agent Romanoff until _she_ damn well wants to talk to you."

She lets the silence hang just a second or two before ending with, "Now that we've established all that, I would really appreciate it if you would both kindly _fuck the fucking hell off_ so I can finish my sudoku." 

Agent Gannett has enough pride to get himself and his partner out of there before she keeps going. 

Maria actually spends about ten minutes with her forehead on the table wondering if she really does care enough to keep putting up with this instead of leaving now and joining Natasha - and presumably Barton - in a state of glorious ambivalently illegal freedom. It's only about ten minutes, though, before her overbearing, probably maladaptive sense of some kind of duty reasserts itself and she goes back to making lines of non-repeating numbers in all directions. 

 

It's about two days later, around noon, and someone's brought her an uninspiring room-service lunch, she's started the in-room kettle for a pot of herbal tea (because she forced one of the babysitting agents to go find her a proper fucking teapot on day one, because if she's going to have to fucking sit here filling her hours she is not doing this cup by cup you incompetent dog-fucking cretins), and she's attacking the crossword. 

Then one of the baby-agents who gets to sit downstairs in the lobby comes to the door looking flustered and has a brief low-voiced conversation with the babysitter-agent. It isn't quite low enough to keep Maria from hearing snips like "demanding" and "here right _now_ " and "impossible" and "in the _lobby_ , sir," and then finally, "the lawyer says - " 

They stop and look at Maria. She looks back, eyebrows raised, not even remotely pretending she's not listening. They look uncomfortable, and step out of the room, closing the door behind them and leaving her alone. 

Personally, Maria would have fired them both for that. Right here, right now. At volume. 

She pours herself some more tea and runs through all the ways she could use this egregious lapse to her advantage if she wanted to, and gets through about seventy-five percent of them before the door gets opened again by a very unhappy-looking babysitter-agent and lets in . . . .

Maria blinks. 

She blinks several times. 

She even sits up in surprise. 

The CEO of Stark Industries and her PA step into the room, followed closely by the Director of Stark Legal and _her_ PA, both women in full Aggressive Corporate Femme battle-colours. 

Maria finds herself with a little more sympathy for the Homeland Security twerps, though only a little. She would _still_ have fired them. 

On Pepper, the Aggressive Corporate Femme look always comes off as terrifying, especially since these days she sticks deliberately to a harsh, clean monochrome palette to the point of being almost a uniform. Maria actually thinks that might be deliberate, and she kept meaning to ask Natasha if she thought Pepper was deliberately invoking military lines or if Maria's just biased - if it's the clothes that are evoking the air Maria's seeing, or if Maria's responding to that air by projecting the uniform onto the outfits. Maria definitely has biases there, so it could be either.

Whichever it is, today's outfit is stark white in harsh angles: with a redhead's complexion and the shade of red to her lipstick, it hits the eye like an attack.

In contrast, Eva de los Santos is in deep blue and silver: deep blue impeccably tailored pantsuit, thick twist of silver (probably white-gold, Maria reflects, but it comes down to the colour) rope-chain around her neck, silver earrings and - nice touch, Maria thinks - a silver sheen to the eye-shadow she's wearing. 

The Homeland Security twerps probably don't know how that's working on them, but the touch helps. 

Both women have their hair pulled back tightly, Pepper's in a tail and de los Santos' in a bun, and both women are in heels that look like you could use them to kill someone. De los Santos is an inch or two taller than Pepper; where Pepper's presentation is an attack, de los Santos stands behind her as a kind of vivid, eye-drawing backup threat. 

Maria's heard that other legal directors use the Director of Stark Legal to frighten their articling students to sleep at night. She knows for a _fact_ that the woman refused to even consider working for Stark Industries until Pepper made a personal face-to-face appeal. And that after it worked, the cursing and invective from the _SHIELD_ legal department could be heard on the moon.

Maria has absolutely no fucking clue what all this is, but it's at least more interesting than the crossword. And there is a lot of entertainment value in watching both women look with cold polite inquiry at the agent at the door, until agent is actually so intimidated she leaves, as do both PAs - de los Santos' holding the door open for the agent and closing it behind them both. 

"I swear to God," Maria says, because she can't not, "I would fire every single agent in this building so fast they would ignite from air friction on their way out. I might even shoot them because I swear to fucking God this level of incompetence counts as treason in its own right. Please," she adds, "pull up a seriously questionable chair." 

Pepper looks tired, and also like she's not bothering to do much with her makeup to hide the tired. The makeup's still there, the way it always has to be, at least until you're old enough to terrify people by looking like their mother, but it's exactly that kind of statement: _I'm wearing eyeshadow, mascara and foundation because I'm a woman and our culture is fucking stupid, but I'm not actually putting on a show for you, I'm tired and angry and impatient, deal with it._

This is a look Maria hasn't seen on Pepper much before, but she wears it well: she has the advantage of being not only irritatingly beautiful but _elegantly_ , irritatingly beautiful, so it works for her, in the same way that her monochrome works for her. Maria sees the tired behind it, but she suspects to most people it just looks sharp, harsh and impatient. 

And while it's not like Pepper's turned into the Queen of Mean, since the AIM mess she's definitely shown no hesitation to be sharp, harsh and impatient when needs be. Maria likes it. 

De los Santos doesn't look tired, but that's another part of the legend: Maria heard one of the SHIELD lawyers mutter that de los Santos could show up to the courtroom in a fuzzy pink bathrobe and still convince you that she'd planned it that way, and make you feel under-dressed. 

Maria's heard the same thing about herself, which is probably why it doesn't bother her. 

She's gathered enough to know that shit did in fact hit the fan at Stark Industries in general and the Tower in particular, to the point of several deaths. It doesn't surprise her: in a post-Iron Man, and all the more in a post-Battle of New York world, you couldn't afford _not_ to infiltrate the place, if you were Pierce. 

To be honest, in all the time she's had to think about it while she's here - having just about nothing else to _do_ \- Maria's privately starting to wonder, in retrospect, where Obadiah Stane's loyalties lay. Granted she's wondered the same thing about just about everyone with any power whatsoever since 1945, but with Stane she's actually come up with some support for thinking they were, if not in Pierce's hands, at least in his back pocket. 

Before she disappeared on the day Insight hit the fan, Natasha had mentioned that HYDRA was behind Stark Sr's death: Stane would have been perfectly placed for that. Plus, his decision to off _Tony_ Stark has always bugged Maria. It didn't make sense. SHIELD had plenty of intel on Stark Industries of the time, after all, and while Stark was an irritation, he wasn't more than Stane'd been able to work around - if anything, he would be an asset to someone dealing under the table. Hell, he'd be a gift. 

With a bit of effort, you keep Stark a useless playboy who happens to come up with genius toys. You maintain your control over the board, distract Stark with the right kind of sex, drugs and attention, and you can even keep him in reserve as a fall guy - why kill him, if all you're after is a comfortable life of conspicuous consumption, or even corprocrat power? She'd eventually put it down to Stane being enough of an insecure narcissist that he just couldn't handle not _obviously_ having the biggest dick in the company anymore, and God knows, that happens. But still. 

It'd just bugged her, because it seemed like he was, or at least should have been, smarter than that. 

But if you're Pierce, you can't tolerate someone like Tony Stark alive and around. Stark's no impediment to being the biggest corporate bully around, but he's a serious risk if your ambitions involve conquering the world. Given the _slightest chance_ to kill him, Pierce would have jumped on it, and fanning Stane's imbalance would've been easy enough. Pierce was smart enough to know that you can't control Stark. Nobody can control Stark. _Stark_ can't control Stark, and Pepper can barely keep him from being a moving catastrophe at the best of times. And someone like Stark that he couldn't control . . . 

Pierce wouldn't put up with that. And if Stane gets caught and takes Stark Industries down with him, so much the better, for HYDRA's purposes. 

So Maria's been wondering. And if she's _right_ , some of the floaters at SI could have been there for decades. And that would mean that Pepper's headaches are probably actually bigger than anything Stark's ever given her, as incredible as that might have previously seemed. 

For Maria, the Potts-Stark relationship will forever top her list of "what the fuck do you _see_ in him?" She never expects an answer. It's really not her business. And SHIELD's shown her more than enough of the complicated sides of human relationships that she can accept it doesn't need to make sense to her to be real. 

But it still makes no sense to her. 

As Pepper sits down, Maria's struck by the part where the formal Corporate Queen posture goes down. She's also kind of touched. As de los Santos sits down, Maria's struck by how easy for a lot of women it would be to utterly hate her for the effortless poise she appears to have. 

Actually, as Maria thinks about it, it's . . .hell. It's almost like Stark. The same cat-like ability to imply that even the mistakes and graceless movements are meant to be like that, and you're the stupid one for thinking they're not. She's impressed. 

"You might want to keep the young one actually hovering over the front door," de los Santos says, crossing one knee over the other as she settles. "The rest of them are in way over their heads and stupid enough to pretend they're treading water, but when he passed us up to his superior he almost had 'this so far above my pay-grade I'd need an oxygen mask' written over his head, and he's young enough you could teach him to hide that." 

"Hah," Maria replies, although she actually does file that one away. It's nice to think someone involved in this clusterfuck isn't a total moron, even if it's just the door-guard. 

Because that was absolutely what he _should_ have done. In fact that should have been what her babysitters _kept_ doing, and given the speed with which Pepper and her legal director'd been let in here, what she damn well knew they hadn't done. This should have gone all the way to whoever was brooding over these assholes now - given that Washington's shuffling people like cards at a cheap poker-game as Ellis scrambles to deal with his _second_ horrific infiltration, who the fuck even knows who that is - and that should have taken at least an hour, and that assumes Maria's near the top of their priority list. 

She has no idea about that. She should be, but she's got no handle on how much of a grip anyone in power has right now. They did, after all, try to threaten Natasha with prison. They might all be headless chickens. But the point is, best case scenario, if she _is_ , that's more than half an hour wait time longer than she had. 

That hadn't happened, and given Pepper's thin smile and de los Santos' comment it's pretty obvious they bullied their way in. 

Pepper puts her purse on her lap and opens it. She pulls out a small black cube, puts it on the table, and taps the top of it; as her finger comes away Maria can see the super-thin circular crack that indicates a button. "Now we find out just how much we've intimidated them," she says, conversationally. 

Maria doesn't need to ask if it's a signal jammer. It's probably more than a signal jammer. It has all the earmarks of the kind of gadget Stark makes for _himself_ \- and, obviously, for Pepper - which means it's probably very, very custom-designed and very possibly totally illegal. There's nothing much you can do about that, as a habit of Stark's. You can't even goddamn strip search the bastard, because it's entirely possible that'd just make him design something that can hide in the tissue of his fucking gums. 

Assuming he hasn't already which, given he'd managed to wire the last suit he admitted he had to subcutaneous implants, isn't a safe assumption. 

"They're terrified enough of legal action to let us in," de los Santos says, dismissively, "they're not going to rush in here, guns drawn. Besides, they'd have to get past Nguyen and Harker." 

Maria notes _Nguyen_ as the probable name of de los Santos' PA, in an absent, automatic kind of way. "She's probably right," she chimes in. "Seriously, everyone in this building: fired." 

"How's the holiday?" Pepper asks, with dry irony. Maria doesn't bother mincing words. 

"I have seriously considered taking a gun off those useless fuckwads just to shoot myself in the head," she says, "and I'm only sober because I've got a stupid amount of willpower. No offense meant, but I'm not up for games, Pepper - what do you want?" 

Pepper startles Maria by being just as blunt - not that Pepper plays around much, but she's usually one for observing basic social niceties and putting the kind of lead-up to a conversation that means you more or less know where things are going. Apparently not right now. She just takes her cue from Maria instead. 

"I want you to sign this," she says, as Eva takes a folder out of her bag and leans over to place the SI-stationery file she takes out of that in front of Maria on the table, "I want you to take the job I'm offering you, and I want you to sort out the absolute fucking rats'-nest of a mess in the security and personnel end of my company. I want to make goddamn sure that nobody ever manages to do what they did on Insight Day again, including the part where HYDRA apparently managed to get their agents all the way into the high-level technicians authorized to work on Rhodey's suit." 

The first words made Maria blink; the last made her suck in a breath. "I wondered why he took so damn long," she says, voice neutral. Not that having the Iron Patriot in the air even after the helicarriers went down hadn't been really fucking _useful_ and basically the reason the remnant HYDRA fighters, quinjets and other independent aerials hadn't turned most of DC into fucking rubble, but - 

Maria hadn't let herself depend on anything, when they were hammering out the plans, and had specifically nixed assuming Rhodes would get in the air - for all they knew, assassinating him would be one of Pierce's preliminary actions and they had no way to warn him. But once he was _there_ , she really had wondered why the fuck he took that long. 

"We're lucky he got in the air at all," Pepper says, flatly. "We're also lucky Tony's so goddamn paranoid and so goddamn stubborn, and that Rhodey's as good as he is at what he does, or Ellis would be dead, too." 

Maria's eyebrows shoot up to say hello to her hair. "Hadn't heard that."

"Nobody has," de los Santos says. And it's not to the point that it's ghoulish or anything but Maria gets the strong impression that the woman's getting, if not a kick, then at least a charge out of all of this. 

Not that Maria's judging. If it weren't for the part where she's bored out of her fucking mind in a second-rate hotel room being horrified by the stupidity of the world, she'd probably be getting a charge out of it too. You had to, if you were going to work in their world. 

"Except those of us who were on the other end of the comms when the War Machine suit finally restarted," Pepper continues, "and Rhodey told us. Meanwhile, it turns out another plant here in New York managed to get to functional head of Security, and just about managed to shut down the fucking Tower, murdered several other members of Security and almost killed the one who thankfully regained consciousness, neutralized him and got us back online, so Tony could do anything for the fucking War Machine armour, even remotely." 

Hearing Pepper swear is odd, Maria thinks. She does it precisely and coolly, and given what she's saying Maria's not remotely surprised or surprised at how angry she seems to be. She knows that Pepper ripped through Stark HR and hiring and everything else after the Expo and cleared it out. And she'd done it well: Maria knew that every single SHIELD plant or informant had been shown the door, and to her knowledge so had all the agents of every other intelligence agency, sometimes with accompanying lawsuits. 

Most of those had settled out of court, for amounts that were firmly under NDA. 

Pepper hadn't sued SHIELD. She'd just fired all the agents and sent Coulson a letter formally and politely asking that he _not_ make her have to do this again. 

De los Santos had gone to work for SI shortly after the purge. And the head of _SHIELD_ 's legal department had sent an emphatic memo to Fury, cc'd to Maria, Coulson _and_ Pierce as secretary for the WSC, saying that going up against de los Santos in court would be the worst idea SHIELD ever had. 

Recent history'd pretty much proven he was wrong, and there were far worse ideas, but Fury'd taken the point, and also taken Coulson's advice and let all interactions with SI go through Coulson, personally. Maria hadn't minded: it took the likelihood of her having to deal with Tony Stark down as far as it could go. 

Fuck. Maria'd managed to not think about Phil for at least the last . . .what, seven hours? 

Fucking hell. 

She forces her thoughts away from that, latches onto the first thing she can think of to distract herself. "Where's Stark now?" she asks, and for a moment Pepper's intensity breaks into an expressive eye-roll. 

"Back in hospital," she says. "He collapsed the day after Insight. Exhaustion. _He'd've_ been in the fucking air, if he could've." 

Pepper stops there, short of admitting what everyone at SHIELD had privately suspected but been unable to confirm: that declarations and rhetoric aside, Stark had another working suit - at least one - and just wasn't using it that much. 

Maria pulls the papers towards her and thumbs through them rapidly, doing a first scan. It seems fairly standard. "I sort out your mess," she says, as she does, "I get your lawyers?" 

"Actually," de los Santos says smoothly, "unless you have another candidate in mind, I'm offering to represent you regardless. And my goodness don't you have a lot for me to represent you for already," she adds, glancing pointedly around. Maria's mouth quirks. 

"Trust me," she says, "I'm keeping track." 

"But if you're working for us," Pepper picks up, "it heads off a couple nasty tricks Washington is likely to try to pull, and makes everything easier, yes. They're looking for a scapegoat, Maria," she adds, with the overtone that comes from being more personal, and less formal, which Maria does make a note of. "Fury's dead, Pierce is dead, Natasha's vanished off the face of the earth and Steve Rogers won't even return their phone-calls. You know that leaves them with you." 

Maria keeps her face blank. She does know it. 

She tosses the papers gently back down on the table. "Hogan's still your head of security," she points out, and this time Pepper's lightning-quick smile is a bit sad. 

"He's still got the title, yes," she says. "His stationery says 'chief of security'. But Happy's back's so bad at this point he barely makes it out of the house and I'm just grateful his girlfriend doesn't seem to mind keeping him happy about it." 

Maria nods. Hogan made her hands itch to smack him, but nobody really deserves to get blown up for trying to do their job, especially when their job is protecting their friend and they've been doing it since long before that friend really deserved it. She might've been slightly disgusted on behalf of her whole gender that he apparently bonded with one of his nurses over _Downton Abby_ and moved in with her, but to each their own. Maybe the woman deserved him. 

Maybe love really was that blind. 

"Your job-title would be Director of Internal Operations," de los Santos says, still smoothly, and continued blandly over Maria's snort with, "a title I'm sure feels familiar enough. The point being, within internal structure, you'd outrank him." 

"There are reasons," Pepper adds, looking levelly at Maria, "that logistics is going to become very . . . significant for us, very quickly. Security is a large part of that, but only one. But bluntly, Maria, you're the most competent woman I've met in my life, SHIELD is dead, and it would not only be horrible for you if you ended up looking at a prison cell for the rest of your life, it would be a fucking tragedy for the rest of us."

Maria gives the kind of half-tilt to her head that acknowledges without agreeing, as such. But she can see the basic reasoning. And she doesn't actually disagree - it's just never worth it to let people think you actually value yourself. Or think they should, too. 

Not before you know exactly how that's going to go, anyway. 

"And as far as the practicalities go," Pepper goes on, "things like salary? Pick a number you like. And I'm having a hard time thinking of any additional condition you'd want I'd care about." 

"I bring my cat to work," de los Santos says, blandly, as if offering an example. 

And then they both stop and go quiet and wait for her to respond and for a second, Maria pinches the bridge of her nose. She closes her eyes, and tries to actually think, instead of letting her mind and her attention run on like an overflowing bucket, splashing on everything they can. 

The thing is, of course, that she'd be a fucking moron not to take this. She would be. She doesn't even . . . not want to take it. The paranoia and sudden suspicion is . . . it has nothing to do with this, here, now, the actual thing, the offer and the situation. It's damage, and baggage, and all the shit she's been ignoring because like hell she's going to start processing where she is right now. 

She knows that. She knows the difference between the feeling of being railroaded into something so fast she can't think, and the feeling of seeing an absolutely golden fucking opportunity with a tiny window to take it. This is the latter. She knows that. She _is_ a fucking gift falling in Stark Industries' path, Pepper would have to be insane not to want to hire her, and - fuck, all the rest of it. 

Fuck, if she were still alive, Nona would spend the next ten years telling Maria this is proof that Jesus really does love her, and that she should go back to church. 

Maria knows that. 

She still feels like a huge fucking wave just hit her. She just needs to ignore that. 

That's harder than she needs it to be. 

It's sentimental and stupid, but since she's already broken her seven-hour streak of not thinking of the dead, the thought that breaks her mental deadlock is, _Phil thought more of Pepper Potts than of almost anyone else in the world_. And since she'd trust his judgement if he were alive - 

Stupid and sentimental. But sometimes that's all you have. 

Without actually saying anything, she holds out her hand. She isn't surprised when de los Santos correctly interprets the motion and passes her a pen, despite the fact that Maria has her own in her sudoku book. The other woman would have to be good at reading people, to do what she does. Maria forgot about the pen in her sudoku book anyway. Plus, the demand for a pen is its own wordless answer to the question. 

Maria doesn't bother reading through in minute detail: anything she doesn't like on reread, she'll work out with Pepper later, because she'll do Pepper the compliment of assuming that Pepper _knows_ that even _starting_ to try dicking Maria around on legal quibbles and subclauses is the start of a fight where both of them lose, and where at the _best_ (for Pepper) Maria gets bitter satisfaction about lighting her own pyre as it takes the whole thing down around both of them. 

And Pepper isn't that stupid. 

Or, more accurately: if Pepper _is_ that stupid, and the world is that broken, then everything really is fucking futile and Maria might as well solve it by swallowing a bullet later. That's . . . basically beyond what she can cope with. So she might as well do this, now. 

Maria initials and signs all the places she needs to and then shoves the papers back towards the lawyer. 

"Just put me up somewhere with a goddamn massage therapist," she says, as her final comment on that. 

She does note that de los Santos looks like a cat about to start a serious rat-hunt, but the look isn't directed at her. Maria can tell by the inwardness of it, the slight distance. De los Santos clearly had certain buttons, and also clearly loved what she did. 

Maria'd watched Stark Legal's coordinated legal war on Washington over AIM and what AIM almost managed to do, and after doing so she'd fully understood _why_ SHIELD's legal head - a thin, intense man named Martin Yeats - had warned them off being on the other side of that kind of campaign. 

Martin's body's somewhere in the wreckage of the Triskelion, Maria's fairly sure. He'd've been at his desk when the shit hit the fan, and whatever side he'd been on - and Maria isn't really willing to guess, not right now, not in advance of any evidence either way - he'd've stayed to fight for it. And she hasn't heard from him, nor heard of him being arrested, he's not on the list of _Wanted for Treason_ that flashes every damn commercial break, and that pretty much precludes him getting out alive. 

One more thing she doesn't want to think about. She knows she's due a whole god-damned breakdown and it's coming up fast. Maybe once she gets the _fuck_ out of here, she'll have some time. 

"And soon," she adds, without really meaning to. Mostly because of that. 

"Oh," Pepper says, brightly, "you're leaving with us. It might take an hour or so, depending on how far Harker and Nguyen've already got, but - " 

De los Santos is already getting up, and her smile is small, and calm, and terrifying. Maria would say she almost feels sorry for the idiots she's been inflicted with the last little while, but, well - 

She doesn't. 

"I'll just go find out," de los Santos says. 

Maria watches her go and then, when the door closes, she says, "That woman is terrifying." 

"She does bring her cat to work," Pepper offers. "It's a Bengal." She looks at Maria for a long moment and says, "You look awful," in the blunt, frank way that Maria knows not to take badly. 

Maria scrubs a hand over her face. "I need," she says, "a _lot_ of alcohol." She thinks about it for a second. "And a lobotomy." 

"There'll be alcohol in the car," Pepper says, in a voice of heartfelt sympathy. 

 

It does in fact take about an hour for a Stark Industries limo to be driving away from the hotel with Maria in the back. 

Pepper and de los Santos actually aren't with her. Pepper's heading to a meeting with SecDef. "I have this feeling he's going to try to argue that we should renegotiate the SI-exclusive access to Rhodey's suit," she says in a dire voice, "and that the Insight bullshit gives him any leverage at all. In which case he's in for a rude surprise."

Somewhat to _Maria's_ surprise, de los Santos isn't going along with Pepper, although the extremely dignified middle-aged blond man in an excellent suit and a very tidy goatee who's waiting in the limo car that takes Pepper away has the definite look of a Top Tier Legal Minion. De los Santos gives a tight smile, when Maria gives her a questioning look, and says she's going to have a "coffee and chat" with someone. 

Which is code, Maria's _well_ aware, for going to see someone else in the field to explain that if they or their clients insist on taking this to the level of formal legal action, you intend to carpet-bomb them until they're paying you for so much as consuming oxygen. 

Maria's eventually going to need to know who those people are, and how those "chats" are being phrased, if she's going to do this job properly. But she's absolutely willing to admit _not now_ , because the moment the well-dressed young woman riding shot-gun in the limo (obviously StarkSec: Maria counts two concealed sidearms and a knife in addition to the neatly secured extendable baton openly on the woman's belt) politely closes the limo door and the engine starts, Maria's shoulders relax _just a bit_ and exhaustion hits her like the Hulk on a rampage. 

Fuck. The next few days are not going to be fun. 

The limo's a Rolls, and the partition is politely closed. The biggest difference from other vehicles like this Maria's been in is the presence of discreet screens everywhere, and one beside her left arm pops up and displays text. That text politely informs her that the trip to New York will take a little over three hours, explains the features of the limousine and what to hit to get her driver or escort's attention, that the one bench of seats turns into a bed, and finally about the fully stocked little fridge and bar. 

It also lays out Pepper and de los Santos' schedules for the rest of the day, making it clear neither of them are making it back to New York until late and that the first meeting scheduled between them and Maria is in the morning, as well as which floor in Stark Tower her suite is on, what's in it, and how to make a shopping list if she wants someone to stock it with other things before she gets there. 

Technically, she could have arranged to have this kind of stuff done at SHIELD, but she never had, beyond the things required to actually do the job. Neither had Nick, or Phil. Sometimes their staff had snuck it in over their objections, but Maria's well aware they were all three of them perceived as spartan fanatics for their jobs, compared to anyone else in a similar position at any of the other agencies. 

Right now, though, she's too tired and sad and _angry_ to even feel the slightest Catholic guilt over taking advantage of every single fucking piece of this. She's also too tired to even think about a shopping list, or planning beyond tomorrow, so she uses the voice-activation to order her favourite sushi for when she arrives, and then pulls open the fridge and the drawer for the bar. 

She's going to the Tower because frankly it's a miracle someone hasn't killed her yet, once it gets out she's _not_ in Homeland Security's loving embrace anymore the assassination attempts are really going to start, and also it's the best possible way to avoid someone getting really fucking stupid and trying extraordinary rendition or some other fucking lunacy. 

Maria has no doubt she's riding in what amounts to an extremely classy tank, to start with: she _knows_ that after getting back to the US, Stark himself ordered a whole new fleet of cars that were barely less armoured than SHIELD's official fleet, or the Presidential one, and once Pepper'd be travelling in them by herself Maria can't for a _second_ believe that Stark hadn't modified each and every one personally until Pepper was safer in the limo than she would be in most skyscrapers. Someone might _try_ to waylay them on the way to New York, but Maria isn't worried about them succeeding. 

This shit is at least 75% of why she signed the job offer: if it's even remotely possible for her to be safe anywhere in the world, right now, it's within the welcoming protection of Anthony Edward Stark's record-breaking paranoia. Given a free hand to make sure of that just means she'll get to make it safer. But given the schedule, the length of the trip and everything else? 

Right now she's going to eat the chickpea salad, devilled eggs and apricot rugelach in this fridge, drink at least one of the half-bottles of French merlot if not a solid measure of the Ardbeg stored beside it, and go the fuck to sleep. 

Maybe she'll get this one nap before the rest of her shit realizes she's not in a high-risk captivity situation anymore, and falls hard on top of her head.


End file.
